Back

A popular NewYorker.com contributor explores the mythos of the body’s strongest support system in this stylish essay collection, drawing from literature, film, sport, and the visual arts to provide historical context on a wide range of topics from enslavement to the opioid crisis.

Back is a dazzling essay collection about backs. Burdened with competing truths about human identity, the back bolsters cultural ideas about beauty, gender, art, labor, and race. Lauren Michele Jackson, who “always subverts your expectations” (Brit Bennett), explores the mythos of the back in these sophisticated essays, drawing upon eclectic examples from literature, film, sport, and visual art. In this book the back is a beginning, a broad door thrown open to keen eyes and eddying insights from a public intellectual on the rise.

Jackson provides a curious, expansive, and—when needed—digressive probing of cultural artifacts both old and new, familiar and obscure, all with something to say about how we think about the back at its most literal—the area of the body without which little can be done—and symbolic—used to convey abstract ideas about work, dependence, and political solidarity. In these essays she takes a capricious view of the main subject, alighting upon such seemingly disparate topics as bodybuilding, Gone With the Wind, horse racing, ballet, portrait photography, and the law in prose that moves between the conversational and erudite with relative ease.

“If I had to pin the blame on a single soul,” Jackson confesses, “it would have to be Frederick Douglass, whose pettier miseries in the hands of well-meaning abolitionists inspired the first essay I wrote before I knew what this writing might become.”